FlackLife mocked Idol's "prefabricated stars ... dancing around like a stripper on bennies"; described Idol as "a TV program that tells people talent doesn't matter"; attacked "a mainstream music industry that values fame FAR more than musical ability"; and puritanically concluded that what people really need is "music that touche(s) them in their hearts, rather than their gonads or their wallets."

God preserve us from music that touches us in our gonads.

Allying itself with the Daily Mail and the hordes of self-righteous rent-a-mob moralists and pop psychologists who've swarmed forth waving pitch forks and well polished quotes about "the theatre of cruelty" and "the exploitation of the vulnerable", the indie hive-mind consensus seems to be that Goodstone's death proves the inherent evil of the manufactured pop model and (by implication) the moral superiority of the supposedly organic alternative.

This is bollocks. All Idol does (in an admittedly truncated manner) is show how pop works and has always worked. Yes, it is cruel and exploitative - how could it be otherwise in a marketplace lacking the low expectations and inherited social capital of the indie scene? And for all its obvious and horrible flaws, the manufactured model (of which Idol is a transparent microcosm) is massively and demonstrably more effective at weeding out the talentless and the tuneless than is the alternative model.

Had they had to pass an Idol audition, neither Ian Brown nor Nick Cave (both of whom are as bad, if not worse, singers than Goodspeed) would ever have had a career in pop music. Cowell and co would have laughed their socks off before tossing the grunters on to the trash heap of pop history. Brown would have become a catalogue model and Cave a car park attendant. And we would all have been better off for it.

In real pop, pretty people who can't sing get pitch correction technology like Pro Tools, and they mime. In indie pop the audience are evidently too stoned, drunk or stupid to tell the difference.

Our problem with Idol is that it is honest. It takes the hood off a business run by unimaginative, drugged-up, greedy, short-sighted, talentless, tasteless, arrogant capitalist scum with shit haircuts (same as every other business, except for the haircuts). Complaining about Idol is like watching a warts'n'all documentary about pornography and then moaning that it's seedy and exploitative and - oh my lord — edited to be entertaining.

A similarly honest expose of the "alternative" music scene would presumably draw attention to indie's unexamined white, middle-class privilege, its stagnant monoculturalism (especially when compared to manufactured pop), its super-diluted ideological veneer, and its never-admitted insitutionalised sexism and racism.

One can imagine the audition stage. The ability to actually sing would count for nothing - so long as the performer looked and sounded enough like his target audience. Talent would be discouraged, flamboyance penalised, mediocrity rewarded. The judges - all dressed like tramps - would mumble inaudibly about integrity and authenticity, and instinctively vote against any acts that made them want to cry or dance or riot or rush down their local karaoke bar to get drunk and naked and spend the rest of the night howling at the spotlight like a priapic wolf with the key to the Viagra cupboard.

It would, in short, be Idol in reverse. And who the hell would want to watch that?

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